The F-35 Lightning II conspicuously failed to appear at the Farnborough air
show this week. Here's the facts on a project almost 20 years and $390
billion in the making

You may have heard that Great Britain's £70m next-generation fighter jet, the F-35 Lightning II, had a bit of an accident this month. But that's just the latest twist in a long and expensive history.

What is the F-35?

The fully-networked nightmare child of Skynet and a guided missile. More prosaically, it’s the fruit of the USA’s 20-year Joint Strike Fighter programme, designed to replace a multiple older planes in one swoop. This single-seat, single-engine, fixed-wing craft, made by Lockheed Martin, will go into service not only with all three of the US Armed Forces’ major plane-flying forces but also with nine of its allied nations. It is also the single most expensive procurement in US military history, with a lifetime cost of $1.01 trillion.

The F-35 – dubbed ‘Lightning II’ in honour of a barnstorming ancestor from the Second World War – has three models. Way back in 1993, Bill Clinton’s defence secretary Les Aspin decreed that the next generation of jet fighters should keep costs down by using one basic design – with minor tweaks – for the Air Force, the Marines, and the Navy. Thus the F-35A will take off on conventional runways, the F-35B from a very short distance or even vertically, and the F-35C via catapult from the deck of an aircraft carrier. The F-35B is the one Britain will buy.

The plane is billed as a ‘fifth generation’ fighter – a slightly woolly designation generally taken to distinguish it from those designed for the late Cold War but kept in use beyond its end. One part of that difference is digital: on-board computers are networked with nearby ships and planes to create an all-seeing ‘combat cloud’, while external cameras and sensors linked to the pilot’s helmet mean she can look down ‘through’ the aircraft’s hull as if it isn’t there. Another key step up is stealth capability, once confined to dedicated craft like the angular F-117 Nighthawk. While the Lightning’s targets have changed over the years, low visibility to radar remains a key part of its design.

What’s Britain’s stake in all this?

Britain has been involved with the JSF programme since the beginning. We invested heavily in the project because we need something to replace the ageing Harrier jump jet on the decks of our new Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carriers. The F-35B has similar hovering and vertical landing capabilities, so we’ve committed to buy at least 48. Remember all that stuff about ‘aircraft carriers without planes’? That refers to the long delay between the QE getting its commission in 2016 or 2017 and the F-35B arriving around 2020.

British companies are also heavily involved. The B-variant’s lifting system, centred around a large fan in the middle of the airframe, is being built by Rolls-Royce. BAE Systems designed, tested, and will build the tail parts of the aircraft – as well as wing-tips for the F-35C and nozzle-bay doors for the B. Altogether some 500 UK companies are involved in the programme, building 15pc of each F35 produced. BAE claims it will support 25,000 British jobs over the next 25 years.

Great. But why didn’t it fly at Farnborough?

All F-35s were grounded by the US Department of Defence because of an engine fire last month. One of the Pratt & Whitney engines broke apart, pushed through the top of the aeroplane, and caught fire while the pilot was preparing to take off. Chief test pilot Alan Norman says the fault may have been due to a fan blade which rubbed against a static engine part, but at this point it’s still being investigated. Hence, American commanders figured it was better to be safe than sorry, though the jets have since been given limited clearance to fly again.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time. The F-35B had problems with its tires wearing out too fast, while this February the fleet was grounded because of a crack in an engine turbine blade. It was grounded again in June when a Marine pilot had to make an emergency landing due to a mid-air oil leak.

It sounds like there might be some teething troubles...

How long have you got?

For years, the F-35 has been dogged by cost increases and delays. In 2001 it was slated for full-rate production by 2012; when that year arrived, it slipped to 2019. Meanwhile, in 2010, Pentagon officials said the cost per plane had soared above original projections by 50pc. Two years later the Government Accountability Office blew that out of the water with an apparent 93pc rise. One internal Pentagon report groused: “affordability is no longer embraced as a core pillar.”

The government has not taken that lying down. In 2012 defence officials said they had no more money to pour into the programme: any further cost increases would eat into the number of planes to be ordered or the capability of the craft themselves. Secretary of Defence Robert Gates said: “The culture of endless money that has taken hold must be replaced by a culture of restraint.”

The next year, project director Major General Christopher Bogdan slammed both Lockheed and Pratt & Whitney for “trying to squeeze every nickel” out of the budget, while the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer said Lockheed was focusing on short-term “business goals” – i.e. profit – over actually delivering the product in the long term. Both companies, of course, disputed this.

…is that everything?

No. Doubts have also been raised about the F-35’s performance. An article in the US Air Force’s own journal, Air and Space Power, said it “might well be the first modern fighter to have substantially less performance than its predecessors.” The author, Col Michael Pietrucha, said its payload was low, its range short, and its behaviour untested outside a computer simulation. A senior test pilot also shot it down, saying it couldn’t stand up to a Eurofighter Typhoon. The Pentagon actually relaxed its performance specifications, leading another test pilot to tell Flightglobal that the F-35 would not be "anywhere near the performance of most fourth and fifth-generation aircraft".

Worse, there’s a chance that Chinese spies have already hacked the project. Reports back in 2009 quoted unnamed sources who said ‘intruders’ were able to copy several terabytes of design data. A British media story in 2012 similarly claimed BAE had been subject to 18 months of cyber attacks. Lockheed said it didn’t believe anyone managed to steal anything, but a report by 2013 the Defence Science Board lent credence to the idea.

Then there are those who oppose the whole idea of spending more than Australia’s GDP (adjusted, of course, for purchasing power) on a new fighter jet. You don't have to be a pacifist to argue that the US might not need the 2,443 craft it has committed to buy, or indeed that it does not need such an over-engineered plane at all. Older models could be modified, and budgets slimmed. Or every homeless person in the USA could get a house. Or, or, or...fill in your favoured political project here.

So have we – or rather, the US – made a huge mistake?

Of course, Britain's investment here is limited. The US is spending most of the money and we're following along in their wake. Even so, for every claim above there is a counter-claim, and for every critic there is a test pilot who says it’s the most beautiful thing they've ever flown. It doesn’t help that in the big bad world of the US defence industry almost everybody has an axe to grind. Boeing, which lost the original JSF tender to Lockheed back in the 1990s, has exploited doubts to push its own aircraft, while a climate of sudden fiscal responsibility – however limited – has set supporters of the F-35 against its supposedly complementary predecessor, the F-22.

Anyway, even if the Lightning’s a disaster, it’s too late now. The project has rock-solid political support. The classic ‘death spiral’, where rising costs cause cancelled orders, which in turn appear to drive up the cost per unit, has not happened. Lockheed has spread its subcontractors and suppliers across 45 different US states, ensuring broad support in Congress – see last month, when the House of Representatives voted to order four MORE planes than the Pentagon had asked for.

Barring a complete change in the political landscape, the vast amounts of money invested in the programme have created a momentum that neither Boeing nor John McCain – its loudest Congressional opponent – can kill. “The political armour of the F-35 is as thick as the heads of the people who designed the airplane and its acquisition plan,” a former congressional staffer told Foreign Policy magazine.

But is it the right plane for the job?

That’s a good question, because debates over the F-35 go deeper than bills and delays. What will the future of warfare look like? What enemies will we actually fight in the next 50 years? Would the US, or for that matter any of its customers, ever actually go to war with a country remotely capable of matching its power? Everyone buying the F-35 will spend a lot of money trying to answer those questions, and even they don’t know. They have to design or buy weapons in peacetime for wars that may not even have been imagined.

A lot of the performance concerns detailed above rest on an assumption that the F-35 will be dogfighting, wheeling through the skies in a dance with enemy craft. But that might never happen: the whole craft seems designed to kill things its human pilot can’t even see, in communication with its squadron and other military assets. It might be the centre of a ‘combat cloud’, multiplying the force of the units around it. It might be used with tactics that encourage stealth, surprise and engagement beyond visual range. It might even use drones as missile-carrying wingmen who remotely share its targeting systems (the Navy has mooted using unmanned vehicles for just this purpose).

Or it might be a trillion-dollar white elephant that never flies against a peer opponent, fulfilling its purpose only in jingoistic summer blockbusters or hi-octane videogames. We simply don’t know, but we’re stuck with it, for better or worse.